Larry M. was my roommate for the semester we spent at the University of Dallas Rome Campus. He was one of the gang that traveled to London together before the start of the semester for a week and then took the train to Rome by way of Paris. He was my companion on several weekend trips out of Rome, too, including Florence, Munich, Salzberg, and the ill-fated attempt to get to Malta for Easter, which was aborted in Siracusa, Siciliy, when we found that the boats were all booked up, and then turned semi-tragic when we were robbed at gunpoint in a pizzeria in Messina on the night before Easter.

Larry used to carry a tiny notebook everywhere he went, into which he would write notes about photos he’d taken, places to visit and sights to see, addresses, hours of operation, Italian phrases, and so on. He filled several such notebooks, I think, as the semester wore on. One day, in circumstances that have completely escaped my memory, he wrote a note to me that said:

Mental Note #7639471
Don’t, under any
circumstances, associate
with Assholes.

I apparently found this to be such good and useful advice at the time that I folded up the tiny scrap of paper and stashed it in a safe place in my wallet. (He must have written the note some time after Easter weekend, because the note wasn’t lost with the wallet that was stolen in the Sicilian robbery.)

The semester ended and we all went home. My sister Anne was taking a photography course the next semester at University of Houston, and she made black-and-white enlargements of a few of my Rome semester photos to decorate my dorm room. One of them was a shot of Larry and our friend Alexandra sitting on my bunk bed in our dorm room in Rome. At some point in the fall semester of 1983, I cleaned out my wallet and found Mental Note #7639471. I placed it inside the acrylic box-frame with the 8 x 10 photo of Larry and Alexandra. It stayed there for as long as I kept those photos. Visitors to my dorm room and later apartments would move in close to find out what the little scrap of paper in the corner of the frame was, and then grins would break out on their faces as they read Larry’s messy college-kid chicken-scratchy handwriting.

Eventually, I got tired of looking at the photos, so I pitched the aging acrylic frames and packed away the photos. I still told the story of that note, though, whenever I wanted to talk about Larry and the fun times we shared in Rome. The note went with the enlargements into a box of photos, and that’s where Gayle, my professional organizer friend, found it a few weeks ago as we were working on a project to sort and categorize my old photos. She said, “You wanna tell me about this?” and handed me the yellowed piece of 26-year-old paper. The characteristic frayed edge that results from being torn out of a spiral notebook was still intact. The scrap had been folded again in storage, and the fold lines were fragile and crumbling.

There wasn’t much to tell her about the fragment. I didn’t remember what prompted Larry to write the note. I only knew that it had meant a lot to me at the time as a symbol of our friendship. To me, that note meant far more than what its words said. It also meant, “The world is full of assholes, but you and I have each other.”

I’ve come a long way since I first carried that note around as a touchstone next to my 20-year-old butt. So when Gayle unearthed it again, I had a good laugh, told her an unrelated story or two about Larry (who long ago took on the much more serious and dignified moniker of “Lawrence”), and put the note into a small stack of materials designated for scanning and demolition. I scanned the note, put the JPEG image online in an album of UD photos on Facebook, and tossed the ancient scrap of paper into the recycling bin.

On top of the old story of my friendship with Larry that the note symbolized—the story of all the support, kindness, and patience he offered me through the rough years of college—I’ve added a new layer of meaning. The note now signifies my ability and willingness to transcend the “stuff” that I’ve imbued with meaning in my life, and instead to embrace and cherish the meaning in its purer form. We human beings love to create meaning—it is, to use the old cliché, “what separates us from the beasts.” We make meaning, we assign meaning, we collect and hoard and share meaning. Our lives become full of things that signify something to us, things that remind us of an event or person, some treasured experience or emotional state.

But things can never be more than just things. Paper can’t be more than just paper, no matter if King John or John Hancock or Elvis himself once handled it and wrote on it. And as much as we are free to assign meaning, it’s also in our power to take it away, to release meaning from the objects to which we’ve ascribed it and into the realm of pure forms. And so, although the paper form of Mental Note #7639471 has gone off to be recycled, the significance of Mental Note #7639471 will always be with me.

© 2009 Edward F. Gumnick

This piece of art has been a fixture in my life for so long that I don’t remember any details of its creation. I have to imagine my parents, who would have been somewhat younger than the age I am now, hunched over the brown-and-white Formica kitchen table, sorting the tiny tiles and organizing them into rows. I picture Dad arranging the chaotic blocks of solid color that represent the buildings while Mom patiently laid out the orderly pattern of the sky. You can see a little wavering in the neat rows where the two sections of the composition come together. Maybe they miscalculated how many rows it would take to meet in the middle, or maybe one of them was fitting the tiles more closely together than the other. In any case, they found some way to make it work as a single consistent picture.

The City isn’t remarkable as a work of art. I keep it because the colors are pleasing and because my parents made it with their own hands. I also like that it seems outdated, a little retro, and that it gently connects me to every house I ever lived in with my parents. I think there’s something written on the back in pencil in my father’s handwriting, a date perhaps, but the mosaic is heavy and I don’t want to take it off the wall to remind myself what it says. I look forward to being pleasantly surprised by that writing again some day—or not—when I have occasion to take it off its hook, maybe to take it to the next place I will live.

I also display it because I like mosaic as an art form, so it’s kind of cool to have not one but TWO pieces in this unusual medium in my room. (I’ll tell you about The Fishies at a later date, perhaps.) My fondness for mosaic might be associated with my Rome fetish. The Romans were masters of the mosaic form at several stages of their history. At the ancient port city of Ostia Antica, a town that was abandoned 18 centuries ago because of the silting-up of the Tiber river, entire mosaic floors were preserved under the mud. They’ve been excavated now, and some of them are still in such good condition that visitors are permitted to walk on them. In the heart of Rome, pieces of intact mosaic floors are visible here and there throughout the Imperial Forum. This stuff could last forever.

A few weeks ago, I went to the Museum of Fine Arts to see an exhibit about Pompeii. One of the artifacts on display was a beautiful piece of mosaic floor. A simple design made of tiles somewhat smaller than the ones my parents used surrounded a central mosaic medallion of much tinier tesserae that depicted the Gorgon Medusa. A plaque on the wall explained the technique. The central medallion was designed to be removable so that if the owner moved to a new home, he could take the finer, more expensive part of the artwork with him.

I’m trying to imagine the house I’m sitting in as it might look if it were undisturbed by human activity for 20 or 30 centuries. If some catastrophe or sudden change in economic or demographic factors should drive us away from here, and assuming that climate change doesn’t send Houston once again to the bottom of a giant inland sea, how long would The City survive? Exposed to the elements, the wooden frame and backing would probably disappear in just a few decades. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine that the tiles themselves, and with a little luck, the mortar that holds them together, might survive.

What might some future anthropologists think of my parents’ cityscape? What stories might they make up to explain its meaning and its historical significance? What will it tell some future museum-goers about our culture and beliefs? I like to think about leaving The City for them. I’m sure some of them will like it.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick